Background
Lukács, Gyorgy was born on April 13, 1885 in Budapest.
Lukács, Gyorgy was born on April 13, 1885 in Budapest.
Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg. and the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.
Professor of Aesthetics and Cultural Philosophy, University of Budapest.
Lukács is generally regarded as one of the first theorists of note in what has come to be called ‘Western’ Marxism, a writer who made valuable contributions to several areas of Marxist theory, most notably perhaps in aesthetics. He is identified with a Hegelian approach to Marxism which was at odds with Communist Party orthodoxy for most of his lifetime. His earliest writings on aesthetics were tinged with the neo-Kantianism so fashionable in pre-First World War Central European intellectual circles, and he described himself as a ‘subjective idealist' at this point in his career. From The Theory of the Novel (1920) onwards, however, the influence of Hegel begins to dominate. Lukacs’s mature intellectual development is very much tied up with the political fortunes of Marxism, and at various times he was an activist on behalf of the Communist Party in Hungary and Germany as well as holding Hungarian government posts during the Soviet Republic of 1919 and the uprising of 1956. During the 1930s and 1940s Lukács spent much of his time in Moscow, working at the Marx-Engels Institute and the Philosophical Institute of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, as well as editing various literary periodicals. On his return to Hungary after the Second World War he took up a Chair at the University of Budapest, although he was later expelled from the Communist Party for his part in the 1956 uprising and even exiled for a while. Lukacs’s most contentious work of Marxist theory is History and Class Consciousness (1923), whose Hegelian idealist bias, lukewarm commitment to materialism and generally anti-positivist sentiments scandalized the Russian Communist Party leadership in the 1920s. Lukács was later to reject the idealist dimension of this work, although Hegel remained a lifelong source of inspiration. It is Lukacs’s aesthetic writings that have probably done the most to build his reputation, particularly his works of literary criticism and literary theory. Studies in European Realism (1946), The Historical Novel (1937) and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) have all been highly influential studies, and represent some of the most successful defences of realism in the Marxist canon. A supporter of the official Soviet aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism, Lukács nevertheless could be severely critical of its simplistic tendencies and he developed a variant form known as ‘critical realism’, which judged novels less in terms of their political correctness than on their ability to make plain the socio-political forces that shaped human character in any given historical period. This led to the controversial rejection on ideological grounds of the modernist tradition in literature in favour of approved "critical realists’ like Thomas Mann. In late career Lukács explored the history of aesthetic theory in The Specificity of the Aesthetic (1963), a heavily Hegelian work centrally concerned with the issues of reflection and representation, and, finally, the ontological theories of Marx and Hegel (published posthumously in 1976. Lukács has been a highly influential figure in the Western Marxist tradition, although his dogmatic commitment to realism and dislike of modernist experimentation have drawn criticism from various quarters—■ most notably perhaps from the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who clashed with Lukács over the form a Marxist aesthetic should take. The impact of Lukács' brand of Hegelianized Marxism can be seen in the work of Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, the French-Romanian theorist Lucien Goldmann and the American critic Frederic Jameson.